10,890 research outputs found
Weird Science! It’s My Creation . . . Is It Really? Or: Crafting a New Universal Trademark Standard for User-Created Avatars
In modern trademark law the process of registering a valid trademark is straightforward. In the United States the Lanham Act is the ruling law of trademark law. The Lanham Act grants protection to the owner of a registered mark which is distinctive and used in commerce. Assuming all the requirements are met, the owner of a mark can use the mark within its discretion and enjoy the protection under the Lanham Act. As trademark law has continued to evolve, the law has expanded to protect previously unforeseen categories. The two most obvious examples which demonstrate the evolution of protection under trademark law are trade dress and antidilution protection.
These two areas demonstrate trademark law’s ability to evolve to address areas not recognized through established law. Nowhere is an adaptation of trademark law required more than in user-created avatars. The emergence of user-created content has begun to become a common occurrence within the areas of electronic media. Video games can currently give players a blank slate upon which they can build their own creation. Issues however arise when there are inquiries into who legitimately owns theses creations and what protections they are afforded
Computed microtomography visualization and quantification of mouse ischemic brain lesion by nonionic radio contrast agents.
AIM:
To explore the possibility of brain imaging by microcomputed tomography (microCT) using x-ray contrasting methods to visualize mouse brain ischemic lesions after middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO). ----- METHODS:
Isolated brains were immersed in ionic or nonionic radio contrast agent (RCA) for 5 days and subsequently scanned using microCT scanner. To verify whether ex-vivo microCT brain images can be used to characterize ischemic lesions, they were compared to Nissl stained serial histological sections of the same brains. To verify if brains immersed in RCA may be used afterwards for other methods, subsequent immunofluorescent labeling with anti-NeuN was performed. ----- RESULTS:
Nonionic RCA showed better gray to white matter contrast in the brain, and therefore was selected for further studies. MicroCT measurement of ischemic lesion size and cerebral edema significantly correlated with the values determined by Nissl staining (ischemic lesion size: P=0.0005; cerebral edema: P=0.0002). Brain immersion in nonionic RCA did not affect subsequent immunofluorescent analysis and NeuN immunoreactivity. ----- CONCLUSION:
MicroCT method was proven to be suitable for delineation of the ischemic lesion from the non-infarcted tissue, and quantification of lesion volume and cerebral edema
Parikh's Theorem: A simple and direct automaton construction
Parikh's theorem states that the Parikh image of a context-free language is
semilinear or, equivalently, that every context-free language has the same
Parikh image as some regular language. We present a very simple construction
that, given a context-free grammar, produces a finite automaton recognizing
such a regular language.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure
Recommended from our members
Bodies of Silence as Bodies of Evidence: Unpacking Intersectional Failure in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
Contributing Factors to Mass Incarceration and Recidivism
The United States has been historically known for having the most incarcerated individuals in its country. Approximately 2.3 million adults can be found under some type of penal control. Since the 1960s, the number of incarcerated individuals can be attributed to decades of tough on crime policies, controversial police practices, and racism. Mass incarceration has raised significant social justice issues, especially since it has been heavily concentrated on poor, uneducated African American men. Moreover, recidivism rates in the United States are at an all time high with over 76.6% of offenders reoffending and returning to prison (National Institute of Justice, 2014). Many of these ex-offenders find themselves unemployed and uneducated, putting them higher at risk for recidivism. This paper will show how contributing factors like race and socioeconomic disparities contribute to mass incarceration and recidivism rates. Additionally, this paper will present an alternative program that aims to reduce overall recidivism rates across prisons and communities
Algorithmic Verification of Asynchronous Programs
Asynchronous programming is a ubiquitous systems programming idiom to manage
concurrent interactions with the environment. In this style, instead of waiting
for time-consuming operations to complete, the programmer makes a non-blocking
call to the operation and posts a callback task to a task buffer that is
executed later when the time-consuming operation completes. A co-operative
scheduler mediates the interaction by picking and executing callback tasks from
the task buffer to completion (and these callbacks can post further callbacks
to be executed later). Writing correct asynchronous programs is hard because
the use of callbacks, while efficient, obscures program control flow.
We provide a formal model underlying asynchronous programs and study
verification problems for this model. We show that the safety verification
problem for finite-data asynchronous programs is expspace-complete. We show
that liveness verification for finite-data asynchronous programs is decidable
and polynomial-time equivalent to Petri Net reachability. Decidability is not
obvious, since even if the data is finite-state, asynchronous programs
constitute infinite-state transition systems: both the program stack and the
task buffer of pending asynchronous calls can be potentially unbounded.
Our main technical construction is a polynomial-time semantics-preserving
reduction from asynchronous programs to Petri Nets and conversely. The
reduction allows the use of algorithmic techniques on Petri Nets to the
verification of asynchronous programs.
We also study several extensions to the basic models of asynchronous programs
that are inspired by additional capabilities provided by implementations of
asynchronous libraries, and classify the decidability and undecidability of
verification questions on these extensions.Comment: 46 pages, 9 figure
- …